We first met Khaled Hosseini when I joined the San Francisco Writers Workshop. Listening to him read his work week after week, it was clear he was a writer of amazing talent. He has a new book out, And the Mountains Echoed, so we thought we'd pick his brain about the writing life.

For week 23 of 52 books in 52 weeks I read The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton, a bestseller that was originally released in 2009, which tells the story of five women who meet in the sixties and form a writing club and, eventually, deep ties of friendship.

Get ready to take the day off from work tomorrow because Hosseini's new novel, And the Mountains Echoed, is coming out and, believe me, once you start it, you're not going to want to do anything but read.

My first "HuffPost Books" piece was posted a year ago this month, and I'd like to use that trivial anniversary to thank commenters for introducing me to many authors and novels I had never read before.

Even when Americans began to travel to Muslim lands, from the start they displayed a more diverse response to Islam and its mosques, which over the course of a century graduated from the crude to the reverent.

Compared to the European writers discovering the great mosques of Islam for the first time, the mention of mosques is more muted and void of romance to the Muslim secularists inured to them from birth.

I hope Obama's renewed commitment to Afghanistan extends far beyond the mere bolstering of coalition forces. What the Afghan people need is international attention to serious failures in the civil sector.

The Sirens of Baghdad I read in one sitting. I could not put this book down. It is not harsh in a way that watching images of war on CNN are harsh. But it is painful in a way that impels you to ask, But wait! Aren't we all human?